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Thoughts on Creativity, Storytelling & Wellbeing

Kenji

Forget Your Weaknesses. Develop Your Strengths.

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Note: This article appeared on my old website full-time-writer.com. As it most definitely applies to the theme of this blog, I’ve re-published it. Enjoy.

The idea that we should turn our weaknesses into our strengths is a common theme in the self-help community. There are countless books and blogs that tell us to focus on the areas in our life where we could do better and work to systematically improve upon these weaknesses so that they become our strengths.

This is a good idea, but it’s a good idea that has sadly been taken to its logical extreme. Because we have limited our focus to our weaknesses, we forget to recognize our natural abilities and talents. We adopt a kind of tunnel vision, seeing our lives a as checklist of things we need to fix.

If this philosophy could be summed up in one sentence, it would be this:

Determine what you’re bad at, and become less bad at it.

This isn’t the worst philosophy in the world, and it can help you get results to a point. I know that it has certainly worked for me. One of the weaknesses that I had worked to overcome was my shyness and introversion. When I was a kid, I used to be so shy that picking up the phone to call a store about whether they had or didn’t have a particular item in stock made me nervous. Eventually, through some effort, I overcame this weakness. Not only did I not have trouble picking up the phone, but I had grown to love cold-calling. In fact, when I became a corporate recruiter, I was making an average of 80 to 100 calls a day to complete strangers. I wasn’t calling them about store inventories either, but trying to persuade them to meet me at my office to discuss an opportunity in a different company. These calls were often done in Japanese, which is my second language.

Not only did I overcome shyness, but I became a better salesman (recruiting is basically sales). In my first year my ranking out of 100 recruiters in the company was near the bottom. By reading many books on sales and the art of persuasion and applying the techniques from these books in my daily work, I grew from being a terrible recruiter to an above average recruiter. My numbers proved it. I went from near the bottom rung to number 20 or so in the rankings.

As the above two examples show, focusing on overcoming weaknesses does help, but it has its limitations. Nothing made this more clear to me when a 27-year-old rookie, who had joined a year before I did, became the top recruiter in our whole company. He had astounding numbers and less experience than the veterans who had been there for years.

That consultant had a gift. He was a born salesman. He was naturally good at what he did and the more he did it, the better he got. Because I had subscribed to the “weaknesses into strengths” paradigm, I tried to convince myself if I worked hard enough, I would be able to reach his level. Over time, the fact that I had trouble getting even close to his level was a source of real frustration for me.

Because I was hung up on the fact that this rookie had more natural talent than me, I failed to acknowledge my own unique talents, which, although they may not help me become the top recruiter at a headhunting firm, could definitely help me become a leader in other arenas.

It wasn’t until I quit my job to work for myself that my perspective started to change. As I embarked on a new career path and devoted myself to doing what I love, I suddenly realized that, despite my lack of experience, things came much easier to me. My job was no longer a daily struggle with my weaknesses. Rather, I involved myself in work that made the best use of my strengths. Gradually, I moved away from the weaknesses-to-strengths paradigm and began to follow an entirely different philosophy:

Determine what you’re good at, and get better at it.

If you focus on turning your weaknesses into strengths, you’ll achieve a level of competency, maybe even become above average, but odds are you’ll never be the best.  Being the best requires both talent and hard work. If you’re missing one of those ingredients, above average is as far as you’re going to get. If you know you don’t have talent in a certain area, stop pushing yourself in the hopes that you can manufacture it through sheer effort. Instead, focus on the areas where you do have talent, and work to develop them.  If you develop your strengths first, your weaknesses will have a tendency to take care of themselves.

One book that helped crystallize the idea of “strengths first” for me was StrengthsFinder 2.0, by Tom Rath. The book is essentially an index of the 34 strengths that you can work to develop over the course of your life. Not only are the strengths well-described, but the book also provides action steps that you can take to develop them. In order to determine which of the 34 strengths are your top five strengths, you take an online test that requires a special access code that comes with every book.

Being the personality test addict that I am, I paid my $13.47 plus shipping and handling for the book, tore open the envelope with my super-secret access code and went online to take the test. My top 5 strengths were as follows:

  • Intellection – Having a need for mental activity, whether it be solving a problem, developing ideas, or philosophical reflection.
  • Ideation – Being fascinated by ideas and new perspectives. Viewing phenomena from new and different angles.
  • Futuristic – The ability to have a clear, detailed vision of what the future might hold.
  • Connectedness – Understanding that we, all of us, are a part of something bigger. Being aware of the subtle forces and patterns which govern all things.
  • Learner – Having a love of learning.

I wasn’t particularly surprised by my results, other very good personality tests I had taken had basically informed me of my strengths (and weaknesses) in a similar way. What was different was how the StrengthsFinder book encouraged me to develop my strengths.  The book stressed that although these were my natural talents, I had to work to develop them or they would deteriorate.

Thinking back to my career as a recruiter, I realized how true that was. In the effort to eliminate my weaknesses, I had neglected many of my natural strengths, almost to the point of making them weaknesses. Because I was too busy making calls and answering emails, I gave myself little time to think things through, thus neglecting my abilities of intellection. Because I was so busy gobbling up other people’s ideas about how things should be done, I had spent little time developing my own ideas, thus neglecting my abilities of ideation. Because I didn’t allow myself see past my sales figures for the next fiscal quarter, I failed to think about the future–the long term consequences of my actions and inactions. I was so preoccupied by narrow concerns that I failed to tap into my ability to see the connections between things. Finally, because I let myself work 50 to 60 hour weeks and partied all night on the weekends to blow off steam, I spent very little time learning anything new.

I realize now that I could have worked to develop my strengths even as a recruiter, but because the job was such a mismatch for me, it made me more aware of the weaknesses I had to improve upon than the strengths I could capitalize upon. Now, because I’ve decided to work for myself I find myself gravitating toward business opportunities that take advantage of my strengths rather than making me aware of my weaknesses. It’s amazing what change in perspective can do.

The Rise of the Generalist Part III: How to Thrive as a Generalist

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Many generalist resumes end up like this. But don't worry, there are ways to avoid this fate.

Just because specialists aren’t doing as well as they used to doesn’t mean that being a generalist is easy. In the corporate job market, specialists are still the ones who are picked first while generalists seemed doomed to fight each other for the  leftover scraps.

There is, however, a growing breed of generalist that doesn’t seem to need to fight for scraps, and actually does much better than most specialists do. These generalists stand out amongst the rest. They choose to acquire skills not to become experts, but to complement their other skills.  Their work is not often perfect, but often quite original. Because they aren’t confined by a single  discipline,  they  see connections between many disciplines, and can make incredible insights in the process. They know that their talents are not easily recognized from the bullet points on their resume and it doesn’t bother them. They have taken it upon themselves to aggressively market the benefits they offer to others. Finally, they possess a profound level of clarity, and know what actions to take or not to take in order to work toward their big-picture goals.

It certainly isn’t easy to become such a person, but I’ve found the following rules very helpful:

  • Learn How to Sell Yourself.
  • Combine skills to Make Something Wonderful.
  • Find Your Missing Ingredient(s).
  • Keep Your Purpose in Mind.

Learn How to Sell Yourself

Selling yourself to a potential employer is just like selling any other product. And when it comes to products, people don’t buy features, they buy benefits. Any time you sell your personal services you have to make it clear how your talents and skills can affect an employer’s bottom line. If you’re an accountant, and have 10+ years financial planning experience, the benefits of your personal features (i.e. your resume) are obvious to an employer. If a company needs a financial planner and you are a financial planner, it’s a no-brainer. As long as you don’t pick your nose in the interview, you got the job.

The benefits that generalists have to offer employers, however, are much less obvious. Job openings that require a little bit of experience in this field and a little bit of experience in that field are the exception, not the rule.

As a generalist, you can see connections between various disciplines and come up with wonderful ideas and business solutions that would be of great benefit to any employer. The problem is, most hiring managers aren’t looking for people with unconventional talents. Instead, they’re thinking about the empty slots in their organization chart that need to be filled, and they won’t have time to be open-minded about how you can benefit their company.

If you’re a generalist looking for a job. It’s important to be aware of your unique talents and abilities, the things that you can do better than anyone else. You need to know what your strengths are before you can start selling their benefits. Take tests and read books that focus on understanding your strengths (Strengthsfinder 2.0 , the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator Test , and Is Your Genius at Work? are a good start).

Once you have a good idea of the unique benefits you offer, research and seek out companies or small businesses that might need those benefits. It doesn’t matter whether they’re hiring or not. Since you have a generalist background, companies are almost never looking for someone with your profile anyway. That doesn’t mean however, that they couldn’t greatly benefit from you. It’s your job to convince them that they can.

When researching a potential employer, get to know the business from top to bottom. Get in touch with employees and managers through networking events, social media, and yes, *gasp!* cold-calling. Make it clear to everyone the unique benefits you could offer their business. If they aren’t interested in those benefits, ask them if they know someone else who might be, and get their names and numbers.

As a generalist, the value you offer is so unique that only the most open-minded employers would be willing to take you on. Because of this, it can sometimes be much easier to work for yourself. If employers can’t figure out what benefits you offer them, the most viable option for you is to sell your services directly to the marketplace. The initial risk is much higher, but the potential rewards will often exceed them.

Combine Skills to Make Something Wonderful

One of the greatest advantages a generalist has is the ability to explore and innovate. They’re able to draw connections between disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with each other on the surface. When these connections are made and acted upon something wonderful happens.

Julian Voss-Andreae, for example, was a physicist who developed a passion for art and sculpture. After finishing art school he made beautiful, thought provoking sculptures that vividly evoke scientific principles. One of his most famous sculptures is the “Quantum Man”, a sculpture that seems to disappear when you look at it from different angles:

The Quantum Man exists because of Voss-Andreae’s unique background in two very different disciplines: physics and art. The inspiration behind this sculpture was his attempt to visualize what a human being would look like as a waveform (waveforms being things you don’t learn about much in art school).

Voss-Andreae now works full-time as a sculptor, doing what he loves. You could search monster.com for years to and never find a job that requires a physics and an art degree. Voss-Andreae didn’t find that job. He created it for himself.

It’s important to be open-minded and explore as many fields as possible. There are a million things that you could be passionate about if you just took the time to acquire new skills. Not all of these new skills will be career changing, but some of them might be. The new skills you gain have the potential to complement your old ones in wonderful ways and help you make a unique and valuable contribution to others.

Find your missing ingredient(s)

Voss-Andreae may have had ideas of representing scientific concepts through sculpture when he was working in the lab, but he wouldn’t have been able to make them a reality if he hadn’t decided to get training in the arts. For him, artistic skill was the missing ingredient needed to embark on a new career.

Six months ago I decided to make an idea I had for a web application a reality. The idea for the application draws upon my knowledge of creative writing, teaching, headhunting, and, most recently, blogging. If I hadn’t had this diverse background, I most certainly wouldn’t have had the idea for this web app. And yet, I wouldn’t be able to create the web app without teaching myself how to program. I bought books, watched video tutorials, and coded coded coded until I was able to put a working prototype together. At this writing, the app seems stable, and is soon to go through testing. For this particular business venture, programming skill was my missing ingredient.

If you’re a generalist, you’ve probably had killer ideas that could only have resulted from having experience in several fields. Most of these ideas, however, are destined to become stillborn if you don’t acquire a certain skill or familiarize yourself with a certain industry. More often than not, you’ll need to acquire something you don’t currently have in order to bring your ideas to life. Explore your hidden talents, take photography classes, or even cooking classes. New skills might start out as hobbies, but they have the potential to become much more. What’s your missing ingredient?

Keep Your Purpose in Mind

You probably won’t know with 100% certainty what your missing ingredient is, but if you spend time defining your purpose, you’ll often get a pretty good idea.

Your purpose is a lifetime goal that provides you with a direction. You define your purpose by asking yourself a simple question: “How can I best leverage my natural talents to help people in a way that is most meaningful to me?” Answering this question isn’t easy, but the more you ask it the closer you get to defining just what your purpose is.

When you define your big-picture goals, it becomes clear what skills you’ll need to acquire in order to work toward them. My purpose (right now anyway) is to deliver significance and meaning to people who most need it. I’ve chosen to create a web app that I believe can do just that. This doesn’t mean, however, that I haven’t entertained pursuing other paths. I have, for example, thought of becoming a career coach. However, because I feel that the web app has the potential to deliver the most significance to the most people, I’ve chosen to study programming for now. If this venture fails, I can always study career coaching later.

When you create lifetime goals, making career choices is a simple matter. It’s not about what will look good on your resume, but rather about what career choice will enable you to take the biggest steps toward your goals. Oftentimes this means you’ll be working in several different fields, sometimes for little or no pay at all.  If you continue to reassess your goals and work to create clarity for yourself, however, there will be a point where your skills converge to help you work toward your purpose, and you’ll probably get paid well while you’re doing it.

The Generalist is Rising

Although the job market ever since the middle ages has favored specialists over generalists, this is soon to change for the following reasons:

  • Technology will enable less people to do more things, thus cheapening skill.
  • Skill is becoming less exclusive. Today, people have the opportunity to teach themselves anything.
  • Markets change. When an industry flounders, many specialists who relied on that industry will have trouble getting a job. Also, markets are bound to change faster than they do now.
  • Creativity and originality will be of much higher value than skill. Generalists who can draw upon insights from several fields and create something new will have a leg up on the specialists who are stuck refining old ideas.

Just being a generalist, of course, does not guarantee success. As a generalist you must know just how to market your skills. You must have a clearly defined purpose and acquire skills as needed in order to succeed. The generalist may fail more than the specialist will, but after the first success, all those failures are sure to be forgotten.

This concludes the three part series, The Rise of The Generalist. Be sure to check out parts I and II if you missed them. If you liked the Quantum Man, check out Julian Voss-Andreae’s website to see other fine examples of his work.

The Rise of the Generalist Part II: The Specialist’s Survival Guide

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As a specialist your job security is vulnerable to market forces and technological progress. The next big innovation will make it possible for a less skilled person to perform the same tasks as you do now. When this happens you’ll be given a choice between a pay cut or the door. If you choose the pay cut, you’ll be likely be working with (or for) people who have less skill in your area than you do.

In order to avoid this fate, you must know both the dangers of overspecialization as well as the guidelines for surviving in a world where the advantages of being a specialist are becoming increasingly less apparent.

The Dangers of Overspecialization

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a specialist, but you should be aware of the potential pitfalls of overspecialization:

  • The Law of Diminishing Returns
  • A Dead-End Career

The Law of Diminishing Returns

The amount of time you spend developing your skills is rarely proportionate to the benefits you receive from those skills. When developing your expertise in an area, it’s important to be aware of the Law of Diminishing Returns. The lion share of the benefit you get from learning something new will most likely come from the first year or two of study. After that, the benefits become much less apparent.

Take the Japanese language for example. Although there might be more than 50,000+ characters in a modern Japanese dictionary, most native speakers learn only about 2,000 of them. In fact, most foreign visitors to Japan can learn just 500 characters and will never have a problem reading menus, ingredients on food labels, signs in the subway station and even some comic books. Unless you want to go to law school in a Japanese university or read obscure Japanese novels in the original language, there isn’t much sense to learning more than those 500 most common characters. After a certain point, you have to exert a tremendous amount of effort just to gain another level of proficiency. Before you decide to do so, you better make damn sure that it’s worth your time.

When it comes to learning languages, most are content to learn just enough to communicate comfortably with native speakers. Spending years learning all that you can possibly learn about a language isn’t an efficient use of most people’s time. When it comes to job skills however, it’s surprising how many people lose sight of this bit of common sense.

A high level of skill may be something to strive for if you’re a professional artist or performer, but if you’re a web developer or a bond market analyst chances are that the only ones who’ll be able to recognize your level of expertise are a handful of people, and certainly not those who pay your salary.

Before you devote time to develop your skills past a basic level of competency, ask yourself your real motivations for doing so. Are you doing it so that you can think of yourself as a “bigger expert” than your peers, or are you doing it to increase your ability to contribute value to others? If your thirst for knowledge is motivated by personal pride rather than a desire to make a contribution, it’s likely that you’re spending more time developing your skills than you need to. If that’s the case, consider rethinking your priorities and widening your focus a bit.

A Dead-End Career

Although HR recruiting managers are always looking for specialists, for some reason there are very few specialists who make it to top management positions. In fact, most corporate professionals at the VP level and above have generalist resumes. The reason these people are chosen for the top jobs are not only due to their leadership skills, but because their generalist background gives them a more holistic vision about how business works. They’re able to see the big picture and take all angles into consideration before making a decision.

Furthermore, if you specialize in one area too much, chances are you’ll become too valuable to your company as a staff member to be promoted to management level. Your skills, in essence, will become your cage. In my years as a headhunter I’ve met plenty of specialists who’ve become trapped in the same job for 10 or even 20 years. Because their skills are so valuable at a certain level, promoting them would be out of the question.

Surviving as a Specialist

To avert the potential dangers of overspecialization, consider the following survival tips:

  • Develop your “Inner Resume”
  • Widen your focus
  • Ask yourself why you’ve decided to specialize

Develop your “Inner Resume”

Don’t limit your focus to developing marketable job skills. Make sure that you develop your “inner resume” as well. Take time to develop qualities of leadership, creativity, charisma, and integrity. Although developing these qualities don’t have an immediate impact on your career, the cumulative effect over time can be extraordinary.

Widen your focus

Develop skills in other disciplines and see how the insights you gain from learning something in a completely different field can be applied to your area of specialization. Oftentimes ideas which are old hat in one area can be the inspiration behind incredible breakthroughs in others.

Leonardo Da Vinci, for example, took advantage of his knowledge of human anatomy to paint portraits that were incredibly realistic. Indeed, many of history’s polymaths, the geniuses who were able to achieve breakthroughs in several very different fields, did so because they were able to see the connections between those fields. If you’re an expert at what you do, and you encounter a problem that you can’t solve, perhaps the answer lies not studying the obscure minutiae of your own field, but in trying your hand at something completely different.

Ask yourself why you’ve decided to specialize

Some people decide to specialize simply for the joy that comes from delving deeper and deeper into a particular area of expertise. If that’s your reason for being a specialist, then by all means, continue. If you’re specializing simply to get a better job, or because you want to make sure that you’re the best expert among experts, then it might be a good idea to reassess your priorities. You shouldn’t become a specialist just for the sake of becoming a specialist. Don’t pursue expertise. Instead, devote yourself singlemindedly to whatever ignites your passion. If you do this, expertise will naturally ensue.

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What about you? How has your level of expertise (or lack thereof) helped or hindered you in your career? Any other tips for succeeding as a specialist? Please feel free to leave a comment!

Stay tuned for Part III of this series: How To Thrive as a Generalist. You can subscribe to this blog so that you can read it as soon as I publish it. Till then!

Photo by: IK’s World Trip

The Rise of the Generalist, Part I: The Fall of the Specialist

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When it comes to your marketable job skills are you a koala or are you a crow?

Koalas are super-specialists. Over the past few million years they’ve managed to evolve the capability to eat and metabolize poisonous eucalyptus leaves. This is great for the koalas because it ensures a stable food supply. When it comes to finding lunch, koalas have very little competition. There aren’t many other animals out there who’d be able to steal from the koala’s dinner plate. They’d die if they even tried. Because there’s little competition, the koala can afford to sleep, be lazy, and eat leaves all day long. Not a bad life.

The crow, on the other hand. Is an example of the super-generalist. Crows will eat anything: fruit, meat, vegetables, worms, garbage–even small animals. Anything they can get their beak around, they’ll eat it.

Crows, generalists as they are, don’t have it as easy as the Koalas do. After all, they have to compete with all the other birds, rodents, and scavengers for a day’s sustenance. For them, day to day life is a never-ending ordeal of hunting and foraging for scraps.

Crows vs. Koalas in the Job Market

In the job market, koalas have long been favored over crows, but that’s soon to change.

Up until now, those who have invested the time to develop a highly-specialized skill set, like koalas, have managed to make pretty easy livings for themselves. Because these specialists have spent so much of their life devoted to becoming a master of a narrow niche, few can compete with their skill level in that niche. They’re the best at what they do, and can often charge very high rates for their services. Because they’ve invested so much time training themselves to become specialists, they’re able to enjoy the luxury of making more money and doing less work.

Those with a more generalized set of skills don’t seem have it so easy. Because they haven’t devoted themselves to the development of a specialized skill set, they’re forced to “forage for scraps” and fight off the competition to land one of those rare job openings that require a lower level of skill.

For the longest time, being a specialist has always seemed to be the safest career decision, but actually, it’s not as safe as you might think. As a specialist, it’s very easy to get a job when your skills are in demand, but it’s much easier to lose your job when your skills aren’t.  Just because you feel you’ve tucked yourself securely into a niche doesn’t mean you’re protected against the very real possibility that your niche will be gone tomorrow.

Market trends could make your job vanish overnight. This has already happened in the memory chip industry. Many electrical engineers whose sole specialty was the manufacturing and design of memory chips enjoyed high demand for their skills for many decades. Then, when Taiwan and Korea developed the capability to produce the same chips at a greatly reduced price, they flooded the market with their cheap chips. The memory chip companies in the States couldn’t compete and many engineers found themselves out of a job.

Unpredictable market trends are not the only job killers out there. Actually, your high-skilled job is much more likely to fall victim to another, much more powerful predator: Technology.

The number one tenet of technological progress is this: make it easier for less people to do more things. As technology progresses, it takes less and less expertise and manpower to achieve the same tasks. Seemingly secure niches that require a high level of expertise today could easily be rendered obsolete by the next big technological advance tomorrow.

Skills are getting cheaper by the minute. A task that may require a team of experts now may only require an unskilled person at a computer ten years from now. This trend is destined to continue until the advantage experts have over generalists in nearly every conceivable field will become negligible. This has already happened in the past, and now it’s happening faster than ever.

Whether you like it or not, the crows are beginning to learn how to eat eucalyptus. If you’re a koala, it might be time to adopt a more balanced diet.

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Stay tuned for Part II of this series: The Specialist’s Survival Guide.  Click here for Part II.

Special thanks to Allan Ecker of the Thingiverse Blog for his thoughts on the cheapening of skills.

Koala Picture by: Brian Giesen

Crow Picture by: Linda Tanner

How Finding Your Genius can Open up Career Opportunities

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How can you find your genius? How can you find the one thing that you do better than other people and exploit it?

This is a common theme in the personal development world. It’s the concept that everyone has innate talents that lie at the core of their being. Once you determine those talents it’s your obligation to let them grow to their fullest potential.

The first time I was confronted with this idea was when I was listening to the Power of Clarity tapes by Brian Tracy. He instructed me to make a list of core strengths and find situations where I could develop them to their fullest extent. Dutifully, I got out a notepad and came up with the following list:

  • Writing
  • Public Speaking
  • Music
  • Learning Languages
  • Memorization
  • Research

Although I believe Brian Tracy is one of the best voices in the field of personal development, especially when it comes to developing skills as a salesperson, I felt there was something lacking when listening to his tapes. These were all things that I felt pretty confident I was good at, but writing them down didn’t provide me with any clarity. They did nothing to excite me or spark my imagination. Nothing incited me to take any real action.

Several months later, I stumbled upon the remarkable book “Is your Genius at Work?” by Dick Richards. In his book, Richards argues that everyone not only has unique talents, but there’s a core talent, a “Genius” that’s unique to every individual. According to Richards, Our “Genius” is the one thing that we do better than anyone else on the planet. It was a bold statement, but in reading the many testimonials about how people had found their Genius and how it had helped them, I felt that I should give this book a try.

The book led me through a series of exercises which forced me to reflect deeply upon those moments in my life where I excelled. It also made me take a hard look at the areas in my life where I had failed. About halfway through the book I got a very real sense that there was an underlying “theme” that pervaded my life. There was a reason I was attracted to some things, and not attracted to others. There was a reason I got into writing, and not gardening. There was a reason why I left my job in Tokyo and decided to return back to the States.

The reason for leaving was simple: there was a deep seated feeling somewhere inside me that told me my Genius was not being exploited to its full potential, and every exercise I finished, every page I turned in this remarkable book, I got closer to understanding that feeling, to understanding my Genius.

Richards helps us focus our thinking about Genius by defining it as a gerund followed by a noun. Examples of other people’s Geniuses used in the book include “Engaging the Heart,” “Charting the Course,” and “Maximizing Opportunities.” These Geniuses weren’t predefined. They weren’t determined by choosing the best Genius among a list of options but rather they were to be named by the person doing the searching. In this way, the name for each Genius is as unique as each individual. Among the hundreds of people whom he had personally helped find the names for their Geniuses, Richards says that no two were exactly alike.

As I went through the exercises, the first name for my Genius that I felt good about was “Finding Significance.” I could see the thread of Finding Significance throughout my life. Finding Significance was the main reason I felt compelled to write certain stories and not others. It explained why I was sometimes not motivated to finish a writing a story even though on the surface it seemed funny, witty or engaging. If there was no meaning, no significance, then what was the point?

Finding Significance also explained why I was probably the best researcher at our headhunting firm. I loved coming up with new methods to find business professionals and their contact information. To me, finding people who had never met a headhunter before and exposing them to the opportunities of the job market was more meaningful to me than convincing candidates to take a job which I wasn’t sure was right for them.

Finding Significance stuck with me for about five days. It felt pretty good, but there was a nagging feeling that it wasn’t quite right. Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t enough to just find significance, I had to convey significance to other people. After some reflection, I was able to revise the name for my genius as “Delivering Significance.”

Finding my Genius: Four Months Later

The name stuck, and ever since then I’ve made sure that whatever opportunity I pursued, Delivering Significance was a core part of it.  Because my Genius was “delivering” and not “creating” significance, I realized that I didn’t have to come up with the mind shattering insights by myself. All I had to do was find that which was significant, and deliver that same significance to those who most needed it. If, for example, I came across an interesting idea from a science or business blog, I could see how the significant ideas in those fields could be applied to other fields (like personal development and career creation, for example). Furthermore, I’d be able to find the best way to communicate those ideas in a way that they could be understood clearly.

No More Labels

After a while, I realized that I didn’t even have to be a writer to deliver significance. Even though I had always thought of myself as a writer and was a creative writing major in university, I didn’t necessarily need to write in order to deliver significance. The medium was not as important as the message. I could be a psychiatrist, salesman, teacher, public speaker, career coach, computer programmer–I could even teach zumba classes. I could do all these things and still deliver significance.

When got an idea for a web application, I decided to learn how to create it because it seemed an effective way to deliver significance. Because I no longer imposed a label upon myself as a writer or a blogger, but as a “deliverer of significance,” I felt more open to opportunities I might have never considered before, web application development being one of them. In university, I had no interest in programming because it seemed to be the the polar opposite of writing short stories and novels. Now, because I no longer think of myself as just a writer, I decided to start learning programming to see if I liked it or not. To my surprise, I found programming to be a very rewarding experience.

Finding my genius was partly the reason why I shut down my old website full-time-writer.com. To market myself as a knowledgeable freelance writer, I wrote articles on the nuts and bolts of writing like: “How to write an outline” and, “Examples of tone in writing.” These were articles that I wrote simply to increase traffic to my website and were hardly focused on delivering significance. As a result, I didn’t enjoy writing them very much. Now, because the articles I write are 100% focused on delivering significance, I find myself enjoying writing more. Not only that, but I find myself in the flow of writing much more often.

My work these days have been a balance between writing the articles for this blog and working on the web application. Because the web application has the highest potential to make money, I’ve been spending more time programming than writing. In a way, since both of these pursuits are linked to “delivering significance,” you could say that they’re but different aspects of the same job. I’m confident that my effort in both areas will complement each other down the line.

I’ve read many personal development books that had exciting ideas that I eventually forgot about or failed to implement. As you can see, “Is Your Genius at Work?” is a rare exception. I highly recommend Dick Richard’s book for anyone who feels a need for direction in their life. It certainly has helped me. Richard’s own Genius, by the way, is “Creating Clarity,” and considering how good of a job he did to create clarity for me, I firmly believe that to be the case.